“I worked at Cocha Cashu yearly from 1979 to 1983 as a graduate student under John Terborgh from Princeton. Because I worked at Cocha Cashu I have seen the world as it should be. Not patches of wildness surrounded by people, but only little clusters of people surrounded by vast stretches of wildness. The word diversity does not capture the extraordinary panoply of living things of all colors and sizes and sounds and habits that surrounds you, day and night, when you work at Cocha Cashu. I visited several other neotropical sites in those years, in Costa Rica and Brazil. They were so disappointing. The forests were damaged or secondary, the monkeys distant, the diversity lower. Cocha Cashu was the ideal. It was also the easiest to work in, with sleeping tents and the two little buildings right in the middle of the study site and the wonderful flat terrain and well-developed, well-marked and mapped trail system.”